Network administration in core enterprise settings is no easy task. Today's network administrators face many challenges. For example, network administrators generally must protect their networks by identifying and securing networks from various sophisticated security attacks (e.g., distributed denial of service attacks, worms, port scans, etc.) and dynamically responding to these events. Network administrators are also often in charge of constantly monitoring network dynamics to be able to analyze the impact of changes in traffic patterns/configurations for network optimization and diagnosing protocol-level configuration problems. Additionally, in some cases network administrators need to extract as much operational/business intelligence out of a network to generate reports that allow for educated decisions with regard to upgrades, feature modifications, and optimizations in the network.
These problems are complicated severely by the scalability requirements associated with core networks having up to a several hundred routers and the high data rates at which data may be transferred through large networks (e.g., 40 Gb/s under OC-768).
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.